Literature

Thomas Phillipps

Sir Thomas Phillipps was an English antiquary and book collector who amassed the largest collection of manuscript material in the 19th century, due to his severe condition of bibliomania. He was the illegitimate son of a textile manufacturer and inherited a substantial estate which he spent almost entirely on vellum manuscripts, and, when out of funds, borrowed heavily to buy manuscripts, thereby putting his family deep into debt. Phillipps recorded in an early catalogue that his collection was instigated by reading various accounts of the destruction of valuable manuscripts. Philipps began his collecting while still at Rugby School and continued at Oxford. Such was his devotion that he acquired some 40,000 printed books and 60,000 manuscripts, arguably the largest collection a single individual has created, and coined the term vello-maniac.

Mohamed Mrabet

Mohammed Mrabet is a Moroccan storyteller, mostly known in the West through his association with Paul Bowles, William Burroughs and Tennessee Williams. Fiercely independent, he left home at the age of 11 after a bloody fight with a school teacher and a self-imposed evacuation from a third storey window. Things didn't improve when he returned home to his father who beat him, pushing a young Mrabet over the edge and away for good. At the age of 12 he lost his virginity to a 27 year old woman, Aisha - from that first taste of promiscuity he indulged in a life of petty criminality. He stabbed people, got drunk and got into fights. His physicality was noteworthy. Tall and strong, he caught the eye of the city's notoriously promiscuous gay community, and also of the men in power - the ones who would use him first for labour and then as a prizefighter. His acquired reputation as a man-of-action, as noble as he was notorious, endeared him to those that began to congregate around him to hear him speak. Inspired by the observations of writers, rockstars, homeless people and market stalls - the ebb and flow of a rapidly changing city dictated the flow of his life and sharpened his tongue whilst late-night re-tellings refined his imagination and delivery. It was both his innate brooding charisma and one that developed over-time that has kept him somewhat in the public's eye.

Voices of Silence

Voices of Silence by Andre Malraux is a philosophical meditation on art as a supreme expression of human creativity and as one that enables man to transcend the meaningless absurdity and insignificance of his own condition.

Walter Pater

Walter Pater's Imaginary Portraits, first published in 1887, are not biographies, but fictionalized accounts of historic figures, written by this esteemed nineteenth-century scholar of Renaissance art and literature. Each shares a common search for a new aesthetic, a pursuit of beauty that anticipated the modern movement in prose and poetry and helped to define aesthetics in the twentieth century.

Observer’s Books

The Observer's Books are a series of small, pocket-sized books, published by Frederick Warne & Co in the United Kingdom from 1937 to 2003. They covered topics such as hobbies, art, history and wildlife. Intended for children, the aim of these books was to interest the observer.

The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr

The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr is a book by E. T. A. Hoffmann. It tells the story of Tomcat Murr, a loveable, self-taught animal who has written his own autobiography. But a printer's error causes his story to be accidentally mixed and spliced with a book about the composer Johannes Kreisler. As the two versions break off and alternate at dramatic moments, two wildly different characters emerge from the confusion - Murr, the confident scholar, lover, carouser and brawler, and the moody, hypochondriac genius Kreisler.

Raymond Roussel

Raymond Roussel was an eccentric genius millionaire, chess enthusiast, and poet.

Zeig Mal!

Zeig Mal! is a controversial sex education book by photographer Will McBride. It appeared in 1974 in Germany.

John le Carré

John le Carré is an English author of espionage novels, several of which have been adapted for film and television. He worked for MI5 and MI6 in the 1950s and 1960s, before leaving the secret service to devote himself to writing after the success of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold.

Opus

Encyclopædia of the sublime